BOOKS

The Lightness BY EMILY TEMPLE

One critic described

as the love child of Donna Tartt and Tana French, and that’s a pretty good description. Sixteen-year-old Olivia has run away to The Levitation Center, a remote retreat and the last place her father had been to before he disappeared. Her mother doesn’t bother looking for her, so she signs up for a kind of Buddhist boot camp mainly aimed at headstrong girls: ‘They were slick-finish girls, cat-eye girls, hot-blood girls. They were girls who revelled... girls who left marks. They were girls who snuck.’ Before long, Olivia falls in with Serena, Janet and Laurel, each troubled in their own way. And all of them start focusing their wild energy on Luke, the hipster gardener at the retreat: they want him to